Hamilton ‘overwhelmed’ after storming to pole in Singapore

Lewis Hamilton laid down a blisteringly quick 1:36.015 to claim an unexpected pole position for Sunday’s Singapore Grand Prix ahead of Max Verstappen and Sebastian Vettel.

“Wow… wow that was a hard qualifying session that lap felt like magic I don’t know where it came from but it all came together,” said an overjoyed Hamilton after pipping his more favoured rivals.

“Singapore is a beautiful track, my heart is racing and I’m really happy.

“It was really special, I don’t think there was a bad moment in the lap, it was just perfect.”

As if qualifying isn’t tense enough there was a bit of late drama for Sebastian Vettel prior to the start of the session.

According to reports Ferrari found an electrical problem with his car, which led to his mechanics removing the floor. After a bit of work on the car, they brought in a new floor with the German ready to roll with minutes to spare.

Not ideal prep for Ferrari and Vettel as they’ve had to change the floor with just a few minutes to go for Qualifying… Lots of Italian arm waving, which could frankly mean both, they’re happy and not! pic.twitter.com/W8sZZSCrGJ

The track temperature was 33’C at the start of Q1 with the humidity levels 71%. The drivers were again warned against touching the newly-painted yellow line outside of the Turn 7 kerb. Any driver doing so would lose their lap time.

Kevin Magnussen begun proceedings with a 1:39.8 but by the end of Q1 the P1 time was down to a 1:38.153 which belonged to Daniel Ricciardo.

Lance Stroll became the first driver to lose his lap time for touching the yellow line at Turn 7. He finished slowest of all with Magnussen, Brendon Hartley, Stoffel Vandoorne – who kissed the wall – and Sergey Sirotkin all out.

The Williams pairing were 1.4s off the pace of their nearest rival!

During Q2 Ferrari initially ventured out on the ultrasoft tyres but were quickly back in the pits for the hypers.

Vettel told his pit wall: “If you believe the merits of starting on the option (ultrasoft) tyre, I can do it.” His engineer responded “no, this is too risky, we’ll go with the qualy (hypersoft) tyre.”

With the hypersofts on his SF71H Raikkonen went quickest with a 1:37.194 with the top-five separated by two-tenths of a second. Out were Fernando Alonso, Carlos Sainz, Charles Leclerc – who whacked the wall, Marcus Ericsson and Pierre Gasly.

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